Kill Children’s Church

A good sign of God’s blessing in scripture on a city is the sound of children’s laughter in the streets. For several decades now a lot of evangelical churches have been involved in a dangerous experiment wherein they sought to remove the sounds of children from their worship. It was an experiment thought up by church growth gurus who wrongly saw children as a distraction to the main event of church for parents and other attenders to the grand worship experience. It was excused because, as the thinking went, we can provide more effective ministry to these children and youth by pulling them out of worship with their parents. This experiment has been a dismal failure for parents and for children, while being wildly successful from a church-growth standpoint. 

I say experiment because past generations didn’t do this. I grew up in a church during the 80s in which kids worshipped with their parents. There was a nursery and some classes for very small children, but everything was oriented around getting the kids into worship with their parents. We had Sunday School after the service. We had youth group on Wednesday nights. But the backbone of our life as a church was the gathering of the church for worship on Sunday morning - everybody together, young and old, in God’s presence. Most churches had a similar plan. But then, sometime during the 80s and 90s a lot of really large churches began championing age-segmented Sunday mornings as a way to grow your church and serve more people. Maybe we can get more people to come to church if we offer to watch and educate their kids for an hour was how the thinking went. This has been devastating to generational discipleship and covenantal worship. 

A Barna survey released last year shocked a lot of us when we discovered that 64% of those raised in Christian churches leave the church in their 20s (https://www.barna.com/research/resilient-disciples). Organizations have surveyed the church-leavers over their reasons for leaving to try and help us all adapt to the sensitivities of these 20-somethings and their particular social and political concerns (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/january/church-drop-out-college-young-adults-hiatus-lifeway-survey.html).  I think this is dumb for a number of reasons, but dumb in the same direction we’ve been headed for several decades now. We evangelicals love, in the name of mission, to survey people who do not love the Jesus of Scripture as to why they don’t love the Jesus of Scripture and then make sure we adequately adapt our presentation and practice of what Christianity entails. 

But the surveys don’t tell us much more than what the Bible does. Of course non-Christians or ex-Christians think a church or a religion is judgmental that maintains moral or ethical norms which fly in the face of our culture’s moral norms (or lack-of-moral norms). “Discovering” this in a survey is not a remarkable thing. If one is newly discovering that belief in Jesus and obedience to Jesus is incompatible with humanistic secularism then one probably had a remarkably thin understanding of what belief in Jesus actually meant all along. 

I want to look at a different source of all this apostasy: kids’ church, specifically, kids going to children’s ministry and not worshipping with the rest of the church on Sundays. A few qualifiers.... I don’t mean to say that there aren’t remarkable and yet anecdotal exceptions to what I’m about to say. I don’t meant to say that there aren’t wonderful, godly, well-intentioned ministers leading some of these kids’ ministries. I also believe that there are a whole slew of ways that churches and Christian schools should provide opportunities to train and educate children. I just think that removing children from the worship of God’s people is fundamentally destructive to Christian discipleship - for everybody, young and old alike. 

But kids’ church  or youth church or whatever-clever-name-one-comes-up-with church (a title that indicates we don’t have a clue what the word “church” means) is a failed experiment. Many churches have taken their children (of all ages) out of worship for the past 40 years in the name of “age-appropriate” lessons, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is merely cognitive. They’ve separated the church by generations in order to have stylistic distinctions, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is mostly about your personal taste. They’ve taken children from parents for the most formative thing in the world: the liturgy of the church and so we have kids who haven’t grown up watching their parents humbly kneel in the presence of God and confess their sins. They’ve grown up and not seen their parents raise their hands in praise and honor. They’ve grown up without eating God’s meal of bread and wine with their parents and without seeing old and young together, as God’s people singing, reading, and listening to God’s word. 

A few thoughts about all this, and the 64% of our kids who are abandoning the church and thereby abandoning the God who speaks to us in Scripture. 

1) The church is charged with giving word and sacrament to God’s people (young and old). To remove children from the place where this work is fundamentally done (the gathered worship of God’s people) is to cut them off from the means by which God intends to feed them and nourish their faith. Kids’ ministries, in an attempt to feed God’s children, have ironically cut them off from the family table and has thereby led to the malnourishment of God’s children. 

2) The primary place where your children will learn to worship God and to love his word is by watching you, their parents, worship God and love his word. The ground of all our worship in the rest of life is the gathered worship of the saints. In the name of teaching our children how to worship, kids ministries have cut them off from the fundamental place where God intends to teach his children how to worship. 

3) If your understanding of church is largely shaped by age appropriate, stylistically and generationally distinctive worship programs, it is almost impossible for you to not be shaped to believe that worship is primarily about you and what you “like.” We inadvertently ingraining our children to believe that the worship of Jesus is about finding a bunch of people like them, in their age group, singing music they like and finding a communicator whose communication resonates with them - not too preachy, not too harsh, but authentic and like me. The center of their Christianity will not be God, his holiness and his word. The center of their Christianity will be them, their feelings, and their personal tastes. 

4) We need the sounds of children in our worship. It may seem distracting, but when you recognize and learn to savor the blessings that God gives us in Scripture, then there are few sweeter sounds than an ill-timed yelp from a two year old during the sermon or prayer of confession. They are reminders of our deep and varied humanity as a people gathered for worship and most of all of God’s kindness to give his city children to do the yelping. Parents, your children are a gift to the church, even with their fussiness and discipline issues. Your work to discipline and to teach during worship is a gift to the church. 

Worshipping with a few toddlers and a newborn is incredibly hard work. Teaching a 5 year old to manage a long-winded sermon (especially one of mine) is, well, effort. But this is the labor, the work, of parenting and discipleship: Teaching our children to worship with the saints in the presence of God. Taking children out of worship for their own private lesson and music robs parents of this effort-filled joy.  It robs children of the feast of God’s people and it robs the church of one of God’s surest blessings. 

At Trinity we encourage all parents to keep their kids during worship. During most seasons we will offer some care for children up through age 5 where we essentially help prepare these kids to worship with their parents, walking through the different parts of the liturgy and teaching them how to participate. But even this is meant to be temporary. Our hope is that parents will eventually stop utilizing this resource and bring their squirrelly, yelping 2 year old into the service with them. 

We also provide a number of resources from bags filled with helps during the service, to some simple ways that you can practice as a family with your kids during the week to prepare them to worship with you on a Sunday. If it feels weird to practice for church, consider what’s at stake when we gather for worship. 

Worship is about God. Christianity is about God. The church’s life and worship is centered in the person and work of God. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing to hear the cries of toddlers mingled with the singing of grey-haired saints and teenagers together in God’s presence. Do not rob your children of this glory. Do not rob yourself of this glory. Do not rob the church of this glory. Kill kids’ church and the expectation of kids’ church. Instead train your children, teach your children, but above all else, worship with your children.